Sleeping for the longest time in a different room felt very weird… to make things worse, I kept imagining myself being treated the same way once I was found out as that cloaked person. That made me feel more like sighing than annoyed.
I wasn’t in the worst of conditions, but I didn’t sleep all that much. I headed to the entrance of the inn to have breakfast earlier than the other adventurers and then headed to the dungeon as well. While the monsters spawn after a while, it was still better to get there as earlier as possible.
“... I am not going to return for lunch, but can you pack it for me for the trip?”
“Sure thing!”
The innkeeper lady smiled brightly and said that when she brought my breakfast. It was a nice-smelling soup with a bit of a long bread. I wondered what the soup was made of… I heard that lesser ice salamanders weren’t that good.
The innkeeper lady brought my lunch in a nice box that was well-sealed. In the end, I paid the rent for one week, so she had enough reason to treat me well for a while. Once I finished my meal, I decided to head to the guild and I looked around.
‘The hell I am doing… I already have too much in my hands.’
Looking after myself was already difficult enough with my endless worry of being found out. Still, I felt like I needed to be a bit better than the others… for my mental health. Between hating others for their race or just being apathetic for their existence, I honestly couldn’t tell what was worse. In a world like that, it was a lot more convenient to be a self-centered asshole. That is how nobles stay in power... some of them grow to prominence thanks to their skills, others simply because they are good at manipulating others to their advantage.
In the end, I found the cloaked figure messing with the trash of the same bar of the previous day. It looked like the barkeeper only tossed the remains of the food of the previous night now.
I tried to approach slowly, but the sound of my footsteps in the snow revealed my approach. That guy turned around in a panic and flinched, but soon they stopped when he didn’t recognize me… I couldn’t tell how that was possible since the guy’s eyes seemed cloudy like they had a scale on them. At the same time, he had the irises of a cat. They were a bit long…
While that was confusing me, he suddenly raised his hands together, asking for money. He didn’t say anything, but he showed this smile that really crept me out… he was covered in dirt and grim and his teeth were dirt too, but what really troubled me was that smile. Fake as hell… I couldn’t remember when I felt such anger in this world, but the smile made me feel really disgusted.
“What a creepy smile…”
The guy retraced his hands which seemed a bit like the paws of a cat too while showing a shocked expression. I opened my mouth without thinking, but those were my honest thoughts… I still knew that one shouldn’t say such a thing, even if they were honest words.
“... I brought this for you… it is still warm and clean. You can return the box and the bowl at the end of the…”
I suddenly felt the danger to my life and then I heard a weird sound above me. I instantly jumped backward… half a second later, a group of ice stalactites fell from the roof of the building. My heart began to race… not even when I was inside the dungeons my life felt so much at risk. I didn’t pay attention to my surroundings and that happened.
While I was trying to compose myself, that guy suddenly turned away and began to run on fours like a cat away from the settlement. He could move well, even though he apparently couldn’t see. The sound of stalactites probably scared him thanks to it.
‘I guess I can consider here that my attempt at a good deed failed, right? I can move on with my life, right?’
I wanted to believe that I was right, but I still followed the steps of that guy in the snow… the soup of the lady was too good to be eaten cold and the bread was fresh and crisp too. I wondered what was wrong with me… trying to make excuses not to help someone like that. I guess deep down, I wanted to believe that I had enough reason to hate the whole world since most of the world hated me for how I looked instead of who I was as a person.
I guess I could assume that since Ovelia and Orland helped and treated me well for two years, I wanted to pass the feeling to another person. In the end, I found him hidden within a hollow tree. The hole looked like it had been carved out by his claws, though.
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“I just want to give you the food… sorry for what I said before. Still, you shouldn’t show that kind of forced smile anymore. If you have a good sense of smell, you can tell that isn’t poisoned or anything.”
The guy was small probably not even one and a half meters tall… and he was trembling like a leaf imagining that I would do something to him, probably thanks to some bad experiences. After I showed the soup and the bread and he felt the smell of it, he quickly realized that it was fine food and then slowly approached it when I put it in front of him and moved away. It wasn’t snowing and the box kept the bowl and the bread from the snow, so it was fine.
He quickly began to eat the food… perhaps he should have cleaned his hands in the snow. While I was looking at his paws, I could see his scrawny arms. They weren’t hairy, but they had some red stripes on them. Maybe cats in this world had stripes… I heard that beastkin in this world existed, but I didn’t find much information since their territory didn’t have a border with the Bastion Empire. His eyesight would also explain why he couldn’t head to the kingdom of Talimor.
“... Thank… you…”
The kid finished the meal in a hurry as if he thought that I would eventually change my mind. His voice was a bit weird… it didn’t seem like he had a cold, I noticed that he had a weird accent.
“You don’t speak the human language well, do you? Can you understand everything I say?”
The kid nodded… he didn’t seem bigger than someone who was ten. If he was a half-beast, then he still had a lot of room for growth. I knew that physical strength was their forte, after all.
“Why are you here? I mean… why are you here alone? You are too young to be living here alone.”
“... My mother left… one day… and never returned…”
“Was she human?”
The boy nodded… it was hard to believe that it was abandonment. If his mother had gone as far as to bring him here, then she should have raised him for a while. Maybe she was killed for giving birth to a half-beast, but while they are usually hated, those people aren’t killed like that… they are usually captured and sold as slaves, but the boy was here alone.
I felt like sighing… I had already done my part, right? I had stroked my ego, right? In the end, I didn’t like doing things half-assed, so I asked him what he remembered. It was hard to say, but based on his words, it looked like he had been alone for many years. He said that he lived with his mother alone a long time ago in an area covered in snow… before that, he recalled being with her in a boat, but nothing aside from that.
“... By the way, how you can tell that? Weren’t you born… unable to see?”
“... I could… but when mother… disappeared… everything went dark…”
Something wasn’t adding up… I never heard of trauma making people lose their sight. In the end, I had this one idea. It was better to check things in order to understand them better in order to confirm what I was dealing with.
“Say: status and tell me what you see.”
He knew how to see the status screen, but he never found anything odd over the years. There was another problem…
“... I don’t… understand the words…”
As far as I know, the system comes in a language that a person can understand. However, maybe it changed based on the location or something. Several species use the same tongue, but some of them use different ones. Since I was a half-vampire, but spent all of my life in human territory, I assumed that was the cause.
“Try to show in the snow what you see.”
He began to write in the snow… his name was Nimir, probably. His race was half-beast and all of his other parameters were normal for someone without classes and at his age. Still, soon the traits revealed a few things. I frowned based on what I heard.
Feline Eyes: Sharp, cat-like eyes with enhanced night vision, allowing you to see clearly in low-light conditions.
Enhanced Senses: Acute hearing and a heightened sense of smell, enable them to detect threats, prey, or hidden objects with ease.
Claws and Fangs: Retractable claws on hands and feet, useful for climbing, fighting, or hunting. Fangs would enhance bite strength and provide a predatory edge in combat.
Darkness (Hex): Curse of Darkness that affects the target to lose their sight for as long as the caster is alive.
Jinx (Hex): The target brings disaster to those who are nearby.
Someone had cursed the boy for whatever reason after probably killing his mother… they found that more fun than simply killing a child. I squinted my eyes since I heard of classes that could do something like that, but I didn’t think that they could last years.
I squinted my eyes while thinking about that… He was supposed to have good eyes, but a Hex could not only cancel that out but also completely turn him blind. Only a High Priest could cancel something like and they only existed in big cities and worked at the Holy Order. Either way, they would never heal a half-human. Perhaps he could find one in another country, but the treatment wouldn't be different.
The other hex was also pretty nasty. Whoever cast that was more than a little messed up in their heads… that explained why the stalactites almost killed me and that would give another reason for people to hate him.
Finding the perpetrator was useless as well… years passed and who knows where they would be. That was something beyond what anyone could help him, even me.
“You can’t see, but you can tell by the smell where I am, right? If you can do that much, you can hunt animals around these parts, right?”
“ I can’t… there are monsters… far away and no animals… nearby.”
South of our location were the mountains, climbing those was hard, even for those who were strong enough. So, there should be plenty of monsters breeding in the mountains. I felt like sighing again… I was wasting my time here.
I knew that it was useless, but I decided to hand him the identification glasses and see if that would change anything. He put them in and blinked… it seemed that it worked, but he couldn’t see anything else aside from my information.
I had almost given up, but then I recalled the classes that this dungeon and the other one at West granted… this could be an interesting experiment.